The Great Prevention Pivot workshop, held in Canberra in June 2026, brought together health leaders, clinicians, policymakers, researchers, and consumers to discuss the state of prevention in Australia and explore initiatives for improving prevention across the full spectrum. The workshop defined prevention across six domains: primordial prevention, social determinants of health, health protection, health promotion, early detection and intervention, and chronic disease management. Participants were asked to invest $100 million across these domains, with social determinants of health and early detection and intervention receiving the most support. The workshop highlighted the need for significant focus and investment in groups with the highest modifiable risk factors and burden of chronic disease, such as people in poverty, First Nations communities, those with poor housing, and people with lower levels of education. Australia performs reasonably well at the basics of primordial prevention, but there are still gaps to close, such as access to safe drinking water and social determinants of health. Health protection attracted significant debate, with a focus on regulatory levers such as the sugar tax, food labelling reform, and restrictions on junk food advertising. The workshop also discussed the need for a stronger structural response to health literacy, with a focus on embedding health literacy in the school curriculum and improving the quality of data and advanced analytics capabilities. Chronic disease management was a key focus, with a need for improved care coordination, evolving the national eHealth infrastructure, and enabling insights from data. The workshop highlighted the importance of national leadership with local delivery, improved investment, and accountability, with local implementation adapted to community context. The five imperatives that emerged from the workshop were: commit to national leadership with local delivery, invest across the full spectrum of prevention, improve the design for the person, not the system, build the digital and data infrastructure that prevention requires, and provide a more transparent and stronger approach to key measures.
